In that email he pointed out that the event offered an opportunity for reflection given Thomas Mulledy’s key role in the selling of the Maryland Province Jesuit’s enslaved population in 1838. The message was taken up by a columnist for The Hoya, one of the student newspapers, questioning why the University would honor this individual by leaving his name on a building and by September 2015 DeGioia had moved to form the “Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation,” and to remove Mulledy’s name, and that of William McSherry, (the two Jesuits with primary responsibility for executing the sale) from university buildings.

Since that point, the University’s efforts to find a path forward to address this history has been the subject of dozens of features and articles in the national press – the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many others.

At the beginning of September, President DeGioia presented the Working Group’s recommendations and announced the initial steps that the University would take to acknowledge and begin to repair the history of slaveholding and the implications of the fateful decision to sell nearly 300 men, women, and children to Louisiana to continue to live out their lives in perpetual, hereditary slavery. Included amongst those steps was the announcement that the descendants of the 1838 community would be granted “legacy” status for admissions at Georgetown. “In addition, our need-blind, meet-full-need commitments provide a framework in which to support students who are unable to meet the cost of attending Georgetown.”

Since this event, there have been widespread conversations in the press on internet among historians, sociologists, activists, and other commenters about the sufficiency of these moves — the call for restorative justice and the debate about reparations for slavery is an active and lively one. In the end, almost every comment came down on the side of the GU’s gestures being just that, gestures: a welcome first step, but by no means sufficient to account for the long-term implications of this history. If you’ve read any of the press on these events, you’ll have a fairly good sense of the ongoing efforts to identify the descendants of the 1838 sale. Richard Cellini, a Hoya alumnus, launched a nonprofit to support the work by hiring a set of genealogists to help locate individuals, at this point upward of 2,500 people. The descendant community has been vocal in engaging with President DeGioia about what the university owes them going forward. The group GU272 has challenged the University to raise 1 billion dollars for a scholarship fund.

For me, the history of Jesuit slaveholding in Maryland and the questions surround it have been something that I have carried with me since I first read those documents in the mid-1990s as an undergraduate in the American Studies Department at GU (CAS ’97). The web was new in those years, and the program had undertaken a collaborative multi-year effort to digitize and publish the records of these events on the internet as the “Jesuit Plantation Project.” These were my first experiences with archival documents, and my training ground for working with digital methods to do history. The JPP is an example of Randy Bass’s notion that we can use digital tools to put “the novice in the archive,” an example of digital approaches facilitating authentic historical research. [This work has been redone and extended in a wonderful way by Adam Rothman and his students in the form of the Georgetown Slavery Archive.] I went on to graduate school, and eventually landed in the twentieth century — thinking about Catholics, race, reproduction, and justice in a somewhat different context, but Maryland Jesuits and their enslaved community stayed with me. And, no doubt, they stayed with the more than 50 other undergraduates who worked on the project in some way.

The Scholarship

The subject of Jesuit slaveholding has been an ongoing source of historical scholarship. The first significant treatment came in 1974 in a Master’s thesis from Peter Finn, SJ. Then in 1983, R. Emmett Curran, who was one of the faculty who launched the JPP, wrote an important chapter that provided the broad outlines of the story for the wider historical community (reprinted in a recent volume). He also addressed the events in his bicentennial history of the university. By the 1820s the six estates in Maryland were clearly in wretched condition and extreme fiscal distress. Rather than providing support for the Jesuit ministry in Maryland, the plantations were accumulating debt. Curran’s careful review of both the Maryland Province Archives and the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus shows that the Jesuits wrestled with the issue of disposing of the slaves from 1814 until their actual sale in 1838. Curran’s picture of the Province is one wrought with strife, lines being drawn between the foreign-born and native-born priests, and between the generations. As the mission focused more on their educational mandate and the need for an urban ministry, younger native-born priests pushed for a sale of the slaves in the hopes of redirecting energy and resources away from agricultural activities. By 1838 those individuals achieved their goal by executing a massive sale of all 272 slaves to Louisiana. While Curran’s account addresses the intricate power structure of the Maryland Province and the subsequent complications in dealing with the issue of slaveholding, he does not address the reasoning of individual Jesuits that allowed them to participate in the actual master/slave relationship.[1]

In 2001, Thomas Murphy, SJ published his doctoral dissertation on the subject, which zeroed in on issues of motivation. In framing his work, Murphy claimed, “What is needed still is a reconstruction of the moral universe of these Jesuit–the ideological paradigms and experimental biases through which they analyzed the world they lived in and through which they approached the moral decisions they had to make.” He sites the following reasons: slaveholding was politically expedient in Maryland; the Jesuits were horrible financial managers of their farms (they were conflicted about money); and they has a theologically “justified,” race-based sense of paternalism toward (enslaved) African Americans. There are a number of things to take issue with in Murphy’s interpretation. He claims an exceptionalism for the Jesuits (“Jesuits always had their unique motives for slaveholding”) that I think is misplaced — or perhaps too celebratory: “the Jesuits always had their own reasons, springing from their status as professional Catholic men of God and participants in the Anglo-American culture that produced the United States.” Murphy’s claim that the Jesuits just don’t quite fit in colonial and early national Maryland is true, but I think that they are more like their neighbors than they seem. Were they more conflicted than their neighbors about the buying, owning, and selling of human beings? Maybe. In the end, did they make a decision primarily motivated by economics? Definitely. They were not interested in wealth for wealth’s sake, but to solidify the mission, they made a reprehensible decision.[2]

But to me, the thing that seems most off about Murphy’s work is the idea that we have done enough to understand slavery and that we need to focus on the motives of the enslavers. He claims, “Historiography has passed through several phases in evaluating slaveholding: championing it, measuring its efficiency, condemning it, reconstructing its narrative and using its example to shed light on pressing issues of today. Slaveholding has received enough attention that we are no longer shocked by its existence or its extent. It is timely, therefore, to look beyond the basic tale of Jesuit slaveholding and study the moral assumptions upon which its conduct and termination were based” (xxiii).

Indeed, slavery and slaveholding has generated mountains of historical scholarship–good and bad–in the last 100 years, but this community of enslaved people has received very little attention, which is a shame given the tremendous documentary resources. And, to some degree, I understand the reasons for that. Each of the major treatments of this particular history has been written by Jesuits about Jesuits. As such, there is an overwhelming concern with the reasons behind both the slaveholding and the decision to sell, rather than to manumit, the community. Moreover, these historians have been working from sources written by the Jesuits themselves, and those sources lend themselves most easily to inquiries and conclusions about their authors. But, the time has come to spend some time trying to learn about the enslaved community and its experiences with the Jesuits between 1717 and 1838.

This work, as the members of the Georgetown Working Group know in detail, is necessarily public history work — it requires a commitment to shared authority and co-creation, because it is deeply import for all of the communities who are tied up in this story. Many years ago Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen did a large scale survey to discover how people who were not professional historians encountered and engaged with history in their everyday lives. Overwhelmingly the results pointed to the centrality of genealogy, family histories, and local stories — individual ties and individual lives. Acknowledging how important these encounters with history are, Rosenzweig expressed concern about the often-missing piece of larger social and structural analysis in those encounters, explaining that his concerns stemmed from a “belief that the past should be a vehicle for social justice.” I share Roy’s concern, but it is simply not possible to do this work without maintaining an eye on the larger picture of racism, on-going harm. This is a story both of individuals and the long-term institutional impact of historical events. The sale ensured stability for the university, a legacy advantage for students and alumni, like me, and a legacy of disadvantage for descendants of this enslaved community.

Slavery in Maryland

To situate Jesuit slaveholding in the larger context of colonial Maryland, it’s important to remember that Andrew White, SJ arrived with the first English colonists in 1634 to found St. Mary’s City. The first slaves in the colony also arrived on those ships. Though established a place where Catholics could take refuge in colonies, Catholics were never a majority of the population (10-12%).

In 1664, the Maryland colonial assembly passed the first law specifically codifying slavery as a constituting a lifelong term of servitude, prompted in part by the fact that enslaved people were claiming that their status as Christians entitled them to freedom under English law. Thus, the assembly codified perpetual slavery based on race, stipulating that slaves already in the colony or imported in the future would serve for life, that children of slaves would follow the status of their fathers. These regulations were revised and elaborated over and over through the end of the colonial period, exhibit increasing concern about lifetime service, miscegenation, and problems associated with run-aways.[3]

In the midst of this increasingly elaborate and repressive regime of perpetual, race-based servitude, the first mention of an enslaved person in the MPA occurs in 1717. Subsequently, the Jesuits began to acquire slave property, often as gifts from wealthy lay people in the area, such as James Carroll, who left the Jesuits a number of slaves in his will in 1729. (James Carroll was a generation older than Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration of Independence and John Carroll the first Archbishop of Baltimore and the founder of Georgetown University). By 1765, the Jesuits owned 192 human beings.[4]

While the enslaved population in the United States grew significantly in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, the same increase does not occur in Maryland. Rather, the enslave population hovers around 90,000 for decades, with the number peaking in the 1830s. In the years leading up to the 1838 sale, that population is concentrated in the counties where the Jesuit plantations are located.

The Sale

In the 1820s, a cohort of American-born Jesuits rose to leadership at Georgetown and in the Maryland Province. These Roman-trained, Irish Americans–Thomas Mulledy, William McSherry, and James Ryder–led the university through the period of growth and stabilization that included the sale of the enslaved community. Mulledy served as University President from 1829-1838, while McSherry served Maryland Province Superior. The financial situation of the university and the plantations was precarious, and Mulledy and McSherry saw the sale as the only viable way to place the venture on firm footing, turning the Jesuit community fully toward the mission of education. Many, many of their fellow Jesuits disagreed.[5]

Mulledy and McSherry’s plan to sell lines up well with the larger narrative of the growth of the domestic slave trade in the first half of the Nineteenth Century. While no one would say that the Jesuits were primarily engaged in the market revolution but they were definitely planning to benefit from it and the increase in slavery generated wealth–the increasing value of their human property and the multiplier of natural increase through childbirth.

As Steven Deyle so skillfully reminds us, after the revolution, the Chesapeake is the primary source of the domestic slave trade. Having reviewed the various efforts to quantify the situation, Deyle affirms that between 1820-1860, at least 2 million American slaves were bought and sold, with two-thirds of those transactions in the course of local trade — not long-distance interstate trade, like that which was finally executed by the Jesuits. Furthermore, during that period, more than 875,000 enslaved people were sold from the Upper South to Lower South. Slave sale prices rose steadily from 1820 until the Panic of 1837, which sent them into a tailspin and decline into the mid-1840s. Then, they rose again in the 1850s. Prices generally followed that of cotton commodities.[6]

The Jesuit leadership finally fully debated the plan for a sale at the Maryland Province congregation (meeting) in 1835. Opinions were strongly conflicting among the ten delegates. After significant deliberation, Superior General Jan Roothaan finally agreed to the sale in 1836, but with a number of very specific conditions.[7] The conditions were as follows:

I. That thay [the enslaved] have the free exercise of the Catholic religion and the opportunity of practicing it.

Therefore,
a) They are not to be sold except to proprietors of plantations so that the purchasers may not separate them indiscriminately and sell them;

b) it must be stipulated in the sale, that the negroes have the advantage of practicing their religion, and the assistance of a priest;

c) that husbands and wives be not at all separated, and children not from their parents, quantum fieri potest.

d) if a servant, male or female, have wife and husband on another plantation they are to be brought together, otherwise, they are no means to be sold to a distant place:

e) that those who cannot be sold or transported on account of old age or incurable diseases be provided for as justice and charity demands.

II. That the money received from the sale be in no way spent in making purchases, nor in paying of debts, but it must be invested as Capital which fructifies. The best way would perhaps be ground rents in the cities especially of Pennsylvania and New York – but in this you shall have to ask counsel both from Ours and externs.

Though Roothaan finally authorized the sale in October, 1936, the sale was delayed by the (May) Panic of 1837. After he became Province Superior in early 1838, Mulledy pushed through the stalled plans for the sale. In June, he struck a deal with Henry Johnson (former governor of Louisiana, whose nephew was a GU student) and Jesse Batey, both of whom were Louisiana businessmen. The buyers would receive 272 people for a price of $115,000, which works out to a price of between $410 and $425 per person, depending out how many individuals are included in the sale. Taking into account the demographic characteristics of this particular enslaved community the price makes more sense. This is a community with many young children (83 under 10), and many elderly (40 people over 50). With roughly 150 remaining young adults and adults, the calculated average price falls more in line with pricing trends.

Deyle reports that the price for a “prime” field hand in New Orleans is $500 in 1800 and that by the Civil War that price is up to over $1,800. That is a peak estimate for only the most fit, healthy, capable individuals. He suggests that the average price in New Orleans was half that for men and slightly less for women. So, given those parameters, an average price in New Orleans was around $250 in 1800 and $900 in 1860. Prices were lower in other areas. Prices rise through the 1820s, and peak in 1837, only to drop of significantly through the mid-1840s. In 1837, the New Orleans price for a “prime” field hand dropped from $1,300 to $700, which lines up fairly well with the deal that Mulledy struck with Johnson and Batey.[8]

The Community

The Maryland Province Archives contain five documents that are key to unlocking some of the central information about the enslaved community and their sale to New Orleans in 1838:

The census document appears to be the core list of individuals that serves as the reference point from which the other documents are created. It lists individuals, their relationships, their ages, their locations, and in some cases additional notes about their status or skills.

The other four documents are business communications that are filled with market and commodity exchange language. For example, the Articles of Agreement includes the provisions, “that the said negroes herein named shall be of different ages from that affixed to their names, and their value thereby impaired, or shall be unhealthy, or in any manner unsound, a fair deduction shall be made for such difference in age, or for such defects as shall lessen their value; and if the parties shall not agree as to the amount to be deducted, the question shall be submitted for decision to two arbitrators to be chosen by the parties.” Similarly, each of the bills of sale includes the key phrasing from Mulledy that seals the fate of the community: “I do warrant the said negroes to be slaves for life, and the right & title therof, I do warrant & defend unto him the said Henry Johnson, his heirs & assigns forever, free from the claim or claims of all persons whomsoever.” Significantly, none of these documents includes any language that relates to the conditions that Roothaan placed on the sale. There is no mention of family unification or of religious practice.

Reading these five documents closely allows us to build up some significant knowledge about the enslaved community. [My work product is available for review via Github.] Although the Articles of Agreement specify that 272 people are being sold, the 1838 census document lists 278 people. In cross-referencing that list with the lists in the business documents, we can see that the population is almost evenly split between men and women, and that the community is really spread through the lifecycle, with an overwhelming number of children and a significant cohort of elderly people.

Of the people in the census list, 155 of them are involved in some kind of family relationship (marriage, parent-child, grandparent, etc.). The author of the census document clearly indicates that there are 22 families, but careful reading suggests at least 41 families/marriages. Small children often go unnamed in the census, but triangulating with the other documents has allowed me to assign names and ages to many of them. Similarly, I have been able to identify and assign 24 surnames.[9]

Families visualization derived from 1838 data.

Furthermore, 21 people are listed as “married off,” suggesting that they are married to someone off the Jesuit plantations. In many cases, these individuals are also listed as heads of families. More importantly, all but two of them are listed in the bill of sale documents, meaning that regardless of their marital status, they were set to be shipped to New Orleans. Also, 11 people are listed as run-aways, but it is unclear when those individual notations were added to the census, before the business documents were draw up or after.

Of the identified families, the largest is the Hawkins group. Issac Hawkins, I, is the first name on the census list, and he is followed by 23 family members, spread across three generations. The entire family resided on the Whitemarsh Plantation. Isaac had a daughter, Nelly, and four sons, three of whom had families of their own. Nelly’s husband is not listed, so it seems likely he was not an enslaved person owned by the Jesuits. Also, Charles Hawkins is listed as a run-away.

Hawkins FamilyHawkins Family Tree

While the entire Hawkins family was slated for sale, the Articles of Agreement document includes an addendum listing over 50 people who were to be delivered to Johnson and Batey as soon as possible in the late summer of 1838, in exchange for an immediate payment of $25,000. This list corresponds to the individuals on the census who were assigned to “Ship 1.” (The rest of the group would be handed over later in the year, with the remaining funds paid out over a ten-year period.) James Hawkins and his family were designated to depart with that first group. A number of other large families were also on that list, including the entire Queen family.

Interestingly, three members of Harriet’s family (Isaiah, Nancy, and Martha) are listed as being run-aways, so it’s possible that they did not end up on that first ship.

Similarly, the departures of the other individuals is still somewhat hard to determine. The census lists 34 people as being assigned to the second ship, and they clearly correspond to the manifest of the Katherine Jackson. But, that manifest lists 130 people, who might map to others in the census. Fifty-six people were assigned to the third ship on the census, leaving 135 people unassigned.

Thus, some work with these five documents is revealing, but it represents only the first steps in trying to recover a more full sense of this particular enslaved community and their lives with their Jesuit slaveholders.

NOTES

[1] R. Emmett Curran, “‘Splendid Poverty’: Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1805-1838,” in Catholics in the Old South: Essays on Church and Culture, edited by Jon L. Wakelyn and Randall M. Miller, 125–46. (Mercer University Press, 1999); —–, The Bicentennial History of Georgetown University: From Academy to University 1789-1889 (Georgetown University Press, 1993).

Below is a (LONG) first draft of a piece that I’m working on for Feminist Debates in the Digital Humanities. It’s definitely a work in progress, and I probably have some things wrong, so I’m eager for comments and corrections.

These are the names that spring to mind when many people think of the individuals who pioneered the theories and methods of digital history. The oft-repeated narratives about the origins of the field are almost totally devoid of women. Yet, a brief survey of the contemporary digital history scene quickly surfaces a large cohort of women who are doing exciting work and taking major leadership rolls. Consider, for instance, the work of Nicole Coleman and Paula Findlen at Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis or Miriam Posner and Janice Reiff at the University of California Los Angeles’s Center for Digital Humanities.[1] The leadership at George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) is two thirds women: Sheila Brennan, Jennifer Rosenfeld, Kelly Schrum, and this author.[2]

Female historians outside of major digital humanities centers are also pursuing field-changing projects. Kalani Craig is using text mining to investigate conflict in medieval episcopal biography. Jennifer Guiliano has taken a lead in professional development training. Erika Lee is leading a broad digital collecting project to gather the stories and experiences of Minnesota’s recent immigrants. Michelle Moravec is using corpus linguistics to investigate the politics of women’s culture and is writing about that research in real-time in public. Kathryn Tomasek continues her long-standing work on using text encoding with financial records.[3] In the public history universe, major projects can boast leadership from Anne Whisnant in North Carolina, Elissa Frankle at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Priya Chhaya at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and many, many others.[4] These women and their digital history projects are just a sample of the innovative work that is underway all over the world.

Between 2006 and 2015, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) offered a Digital Innovation Fellowship for scholars who sought a year of support to work on a major digital project. During that period, ACLS awarded fellowships to 14 historians, 5 of whom were women.[5] In 2007, both Patricia Seed and Anne Sarah Rubin received fellowships for historical geospatial work. In 2010, Abigail Firey received an award to work on the Carolingian Canon Law Project. The next year, Ruth Mostern’s geospatial work on the Yellow River and imperial engineering in North China was funded. And, most recently, Kim Gallon received support for her work on the Black press. [6] This range of work suggests the breath and depth of the ways that women are bringing digital theories and methods into their historical work.

These individual historians are not anomalies. In 2013 and 2015 Bryn Mawr College’s Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education, under the direction of Monica Mercado, has hosted the Women’s History in the Digital World Conference, bringing together dozens of women doing digital women’s history work.[7] The population of female graduate students doing digital history also continues to grow.[8] Furthermore, female historians are over represented among the cohort of mid-career scholars who want to learn new digital methods. Of the applicants for RRCHNM’s National Endowment for the Humanities funded summer institute, Doing Digital History (2014), 71% of the applications for participation came from women, and 65% of the selected participants were women.[9] In sum, the contemporary cohort of female digital historians is robust, and it looks to remain that way.

All of this begs the question, why are there so few women in the history of digital history?

For over a decade now scholars have begun their search for the roots of digital humanities with the opening essay in Schreibman, et al.’s 2004 collection, A Companion to Digital Humanities. Susan Hockey’s “The History of Humanities Computing” offers an origin story that is deeply steeped in computational text analysis and text processing. It begins with the initial effort of Italian Jesuit Roberto Busa and IBM to create a concordance of Thomistic writings, and continues through the founding of key scholarly associations, the development of the Text Encoding Initiative, and the launch of thematic source collections on the Internet. Hockey’s narrative leans toward the literary and linguistic, with little attention to how those with disciplinary commitments in fields such as history, archeology, or anthropology might have found their with to the digital humanities. Those stories are saved for subsequent individual essays from the collection that deal with the various disciplines.[10]

As a result curious or aspiring digital historians are likely to turn to Will Thomas’s essay “Computing and the Historical Imagination” in search of a background on how their fellow historians came to employ digital approaches. Thomas’s chapter traces the birth of digital history back to the quantitative history movement of the 1960s and 1970s, signaled most vividly and controversially by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974). Various social history projects brought statistical and computational analysis to the fore of historical investigation, and for some that route brought them to a more expansive interest in historical methods. As computing technologies became more affordable and easier to work with, historians embraced the use of databases to track and analyze source materials. Access to the world wide web in the early 1990s offered another set of possibilities for expanding access to historical sources and combining them in new ways for scholarly, educational, and public audiences. Thomas suggests that there were vast possibilities for new modes of presentation of historical scholarship, and new tools of analysis to be applied, with Historical GIS as garnering the most energy and attention at the point of his writing in the early years of the 21st century. While it offers a familiar story that deals with methodological shifts in the practice of history, Thomas’s version of the emergence of digital history methods neither includes nor cites any digital historians who are women. Anne Kelly Knowles, who is a geographer rather than an historian, is the sole woman mentioned engaged in digital ventures. [11]

Published shortly after the Companion, Roy Rosenzweig and Dan Cohen’s Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past (2005) offers a more practical approach to field of digital history. It too includes an introduction to the history of field—one that is slightly more inclusive that Thomas’s in its treatment of genres and approaches. This is a democratic and capacious vision of the history web that does not hue to narrowly cast definitions of historical scholarship. Rather, it includes examples that are designed for public audiences and that which targets the K12 educational fields. Yet, Rosenzweig and Cohen managed to point to the digital work of only one woman: Kathryn Kish Scalar, who with Thomas Dublin developed Women in Social Movements in the United States, 1775-2000.[12]

More recent reviews of the field tend to reproduce these oversights, suggesting that the history of digital history is a settled one—one that is devoid of women. For example, in her 2014 attempt to puzzle through the complexities of the interdisciplinary that characterizes so much digital scholarship, Julia Thompson Klein lays out a set of definitions of digital humanities and a summary of how digital work has played out in core disciplines. While English comes in for extensive discussion, Klein offers only three paragraphs each on history and archeology. For history, Klein turns in bulk to Thomas’s narrative, with some highlights from a 2008 interchange in the Journal of American History and brief article from the American Historical Association’s Perspectives Magazine by Thomas and Douglas Seefeldt. Again, no women feature in Klein’s gloss on the history of digital history.[13]

Knowing that Thomas, Cohen, Rosenzweig, Seefeldt, and Klein are all careful scholars, none of whom has a willful desire to overlook women’s efforts, one might reasonably come away with the impression that digital history is a field with no women. Obviously that is not true. In fact, women have played essential roles in shaping the digital history, and we can find them if we know where to look. But, in addition to undertaking the task of recovering women’s contributions to the field, we have an obligation to question the conditions that have contributed to their erasure, and to consider what systems and conditions become visible when we return them to the origin stories for the field. If we refuse to interrogate them, then these origin stories will solidify in a way that not only distorts the history of digital history, but also in ways that shape the field in disadvantageous ways going forward.

Just as the contemporary cohort of female digital historians is vibrant, women were integral collaborators in the work from the beginning. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has been the most substantial source of public funding for digital history through the years at universities and cultural heritage institutions. While the Office of Digital Humanities was established in 2008, digital history work has been funded at the NEH through the wide range of programs and divisions since the mid-1990s. A comprehensive search of the grants database for digital history projects yields 586 individual grants funded between 1994 and 2016. A review of those results showed that women served as principal investigator or Co-PI on 300 projects, or 51% of the awards.[14] This relative parity suggests that we must look deeper and further afield to reclaim the history of women in the digital history. Then, we can begin to understand the structural forces in the academy and in cultural heritage institutions that facilitate the erasure of women’s influence.

If women have served as principal investigator for roughly half of the NEH-funded digital history projects, then why do we not know about their projects and recognize them as leaders in the field? One possibility is the pervasive gender bias in citations. Study after study shows women’s scholarship simply gets cited less than men’s in many, many fields.[15] That research cannot be discounted here, but once we recognize that women were there as active agents and innovators, guiding and shaping the early work of digital history it becomes clear that there are other power differentials in play here.

Thus, we must undertake a recovery of the women of digital history. Even if we focus primarily on the first ten years of the web, this surfacing will quickly open our frame of reference. It pushes us to direct our gaze beyond senior scholars in traditional academic positions to see a range of kinds of work and a range of contributors. Once we go looking for the women who innovated in digital history, those who were present to shape the early projects, we see a broader picture of historical practice, one akin to what Rob Townsend refers to as the “historical enterprise,” one that is wider than the halls of academe, filled with many more actors than the tenured few.[16]

Significant structural factors in labor conditions have combined to perpetuate a “great man theory” history of digital history: status, access, flexibility, and authorizing and credentialing systems. First, structures within the academy have historically slowed women historians’ advancement, preventing them from surfacing in leadership positions with digital projects. Second, a narrow focus on project directors causes us to overlook the vast contributions of women in other roles on projects. Third, limiting our attention digital work done within the halls of academe excludes the work of women who land in non-academic positions. Furthermore, the ways that public history organizations represent their work can make it difficult to identify women’s labor on these projects. Together these conditions make it easy for historians of digital history to perpetuate the impression that the pioneering work in the field was done by men.

Beyond the Senior Faculty

Academic labor practices, conditions, and structures have conspired to mask or reduce women’s roles in digital history. A number of studies prove that women achieve senior status in history departments at much slower rates than men. Also, history departments have been slow to recognize digital work as authorized scholarly activity for promotion and tenure review. Without the benefits of tenure, women are much less free to take on principle investigator or project director roles. Thus, these conditions have places women historians at a distinct disadvantage as they sought to pursue digital work. Finally, large-scale collaborative digital history has been deeply dependent on contingent faculty and staff, many of whom are women.

In 1969, the American Historical Association (AHA) formed an ad hoc Committee on the Status of Women, which then was institutionalized as the Committee on Women Historians in 1971. The ad hoc committee produced a report, known as the “Rose report,” in 1970 that serves as a baseline for understanding the position and experiences of women in the field. The findings were not promising. In the 1960s, the top ten history graduate programs granted about 15% of their degrees to women, but the faculties in the same departments were 98-99% men. Moreover, while there 16% of the full professors in History in coeducational colleges had been women in the 1959-1960 year, by 1968-1969 on one woman remained at that rank. Summarizing the state of the field, the authors explained,

In history as in other academic areas, our sample of thirty institutions indicates women are employed primarily in non-tenured ranks. Moreover, far from abandoning their professions for pure domesticity, their very eagerness to work has made women vulnerable to exploitation. Their readiness—and sometimes their need—to accept irregular and part-time positions has led to their exclusion from participation in the main stream of academic rewards and preferment.[17]

The situation has gotten somewhat better in intervening years, but slowly. The results from the AHA’s survey in 1979-80 put the percentage of women history faculty at 13.3, while women comprised only 5.9% at the full professor rank, 11.6% at the associate level, 25.3% at the assistant level, and 40.6% at the instructor rank. By 1988 things had improved slightly, with women making up 17.1% of the history faculty, and 8.2% at full, 14.2% at associate, 38.9% at assistant ranks, and 37.3% as instructors. With the 1998 survey, women had risen to 55% of history faculty at the assistant level, but only 18% of faculty at the full professor level.[18]

In 2006, the Committee on Women Historians published The Status of Women in the Historical Profession, 2005, based on a survey sent to all the women members of the AHA, which yielded 362 responses. The report provides a fascinating qualitative snap-shot of the sexism and discrimination in the field. Time to promotion and salaries continue to lag behind. Women bear an inordinate brunt of the burden of service. Assumptions about gender powerfully shape subjective, if standardized, evaluations of research, teaching, and service. Women shoulder a disproportionate responsibility for child and eldercare, which can disrupt early and mid-career advancement. The survey results prompted the CWH to issue a statement on best practices in supporting gender equity in the workplace.[19]

These findings echo the classic of sociologist Arlie Hochschild, whose 1989 book The Second Shift, articulated the way that women are hindered by bearing the brunt of domestic responsibilities while also working to maintain a productive professional life.[20] This bind can be especially difficult for women in academe who may face the impact of child bearing and rearing at exactly the time when their careers require the most concentrated scholarly progress in the years leading up to tenure review. Not all women find themselves in this position, but enough do to contribute to the slowing of forward motion on the promotion track for women in the sector overall.

Furthermore, the structures of academic advancement in history have been slow to recognize digital scholarship for promotion and tenure, disadvantaging all scholars working in the field, but especially women whose promotion can be slowed by other factors. While the Modern Language Association has had guidelines on evaluating digital scholarship since 2000, the historical profession had no such guidance until recently. [21] As a result those hoping to build and support tenure cases for digital historians had to rely upon the example of the MLA and adapt the 2010 report of the Organization of American Historians-National Council on Public History-American Historical Association’s Working Group on Evaluation of Public History Scholarship, “Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian.”[22] The AHA recently has adopted a set of guidelines, raising the hopes of those who want to put digital methods at the center of their careers.[23]

Even with these pressures, women were prime movers in some of the earliest digital history projects. For instance, in September 2000, Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life published its first issue.[24] As its founding editors, Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore embraced the possibilities of the web for creating community and conversation around history early in their careers. Kamensky was a junior professor at Brandeis, not yet the Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Similarly, Lepore had yet to take up her role as a staff writer for The New Yorker, or assume her current position as Harvard College Professor.[25]Common-Place represented one of the first attempts to create a fully digital publication for the historical community. Each issue included feature columns, reviews, a teaching section, a focus on material culture and an author interview. Now sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and the University of Connecticut, the journal continues to publish quarterly.[26]

Since 2001, the Journal of American History has published reviews of over 300 digital projects, covering a wide range of types, including digital collections, exhibits, teaching and learn projects, and many other hybrid projects.[27] And, the first website to be reviewed by the Journal of American History in 2001 was an outgrowth of women’s history produced by women, and it was reviewed by a woman, Jane Kamensky. DoHistory was the companion site to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s prize winning 1990 book, A Midwife’s Tail, and Writer-Producer Laurie Kahn-Leavitt and Director Richard Rogers’s film, which dramatized both the historian’s process and the life of the eighteenth century midwife who’s diary was at the heart of the story. Created by the Film Studies Center at Harvard University, the site allows visitors to explore Martha Ballard’s diary and the historical investigations that went into piecing together Ballard’s story, and the book and film that followed.[28]

By 2012 women made up 37.7% of the history faculty at four-year institutions, but that growth in numbers does not necessarily indicate an easing of the conditions that slow women’s advancement.[29] And, advancement matters deeply to the ways that the story of digital history gets told. This slow penetration of the upper ranks of the profession contributes to the erasure of women from the representation of leadership in digital history. One key reason is the ways that federal grant requirements are structured. For the most part, securing federal funding requires an applicant to provide a significant amount of cost-shared resources from their university, often representing an amount equal to the requested funding. For women who are slower to advance to tenure and through the ranks of promotion, the resulting differential in salary can make generating that cost-share required to lead these projects very difficult. Similarly, struggling under the additional responsibilities of service that are foisted upon women and people of color can make it remarkably difficult to make time for outside research projects that involve a level of service and management of their own that far exceeds that required to produced a single-authored monograph.

Beyond the Principal Investigator

Frequently the attribution of credit for digital work stops at the top of the masthead, so to speak, with the principal investigator or the project director. Even if this practice is simply as result of convenience—a shorthand, it contributes to the historical erasure of women from the field. While the funding agencies do not generally set terribly restrictive policies, each applicant organization sets the terms by which an individual can serve as a principal investigator. In many colleges and universities, individuals who hold staff positions are not eligible to hold the role. In other institutions, one must have a doctoral degree to serve as a PI. Those who have a doctoral degree but who are funded by sponsored research projects cannot offer any salary cost-share to the budgeting process, so are frequently not named as principal investigators on projects, despite playing primary roles in the work. Given these restrictions, a true review of the history of digital history requires that we investigate the full breath of the collaborative groups that have produced digital history in the past. Looking past the project directors to the project managers, the researchers, and the staff reveals that women were major contributors to this work at all stages along the way.

The University of Virginia’s The Valley of the Shadow project, begun in 1991 and launched on the web in 1993, stands as the quite possibly the most visible digital history project in the field, winning the AHA’s James Harvey Robinson Award for outstanding teaching aid in 2002 and the MERLOT Classics award in 2005, among others.[30] While the project is often framed as the work of Edward Ayers and William G. Thomas, the list of integral co-editors also included Anne Sarah Rubin and Andrew Torget, both of whom have gone on to have significant careers in digital history. Rubin was a graduate student when she served as project manager for the project between 1993 and 1996, and she took off the 1995-1996 school year to work full time on the Valley. In 2000, she was coauthor with Edward Ayers of The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in The American Civil War. Part I: The Eve of War.[31] Rubin went on to earn an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship that contributed to the production of Sherman’s March and America: Mapping Memory the geospatial site that accompanied her 2014 book Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory.[32]

By the late 1990s, a collaborative team from the American Social History Project—Center for Media and Learning at The Graduate Center/City University of New York and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University embarked on History Matters: the U.S. Survey Course on the Web. The leadership team for the project was evenly split between men and women, with Pennee Bender, Stephen Brier, Joshua Brown, Ellen Noonan, Roy Rosenzweig, and Kelly Schrum guiding the work that produced over 1,000 edited and annotated primary sources, hundreds of website reviews, and a cluster of multimedia guides to analyzing various types of historical evidence.[33] In 2005, History Matters won the American Historical Association’s James Harvey Robinson Prize for its contribution to the teaching and learning of history. In the years after History Matters, Bender, Noonan, and Schrum have produced dozens of digital history projects, many centered on pedagogy, from their respective roles at ASHP/CML and RRCHNM.[34]

This initial work on the Valley of the Shadow and on History Matters took place in conjunction with the creation of some of the key institutions that supported the growth of digital history. Founded in 1981 by noted labor historian Herbert Gutman and Steven Brier, the American Social History Project (ASHP) was the first of the organizations to embrace digital means to develop and distribute their work. In 1990, ASPH became a research center at the City University of New York, known as the Center for Media Learning (CML). Joshua Brown took over as the Executive Director in 1998. ASHP/CML has always had a staff with many women in leadership positions, with current Associate Director Andrea Adas Vásquez joining in 1989, current Associate Director Pennee Bender joining in 1992, and Ellen Noonan joining in 1998. Each of these women has been integral to the development and success of a host of digital history projects over the last twenty-five years.[35]

A close collaborator with the ASHP/CML team, Roy Rosenzweig founded the Center for History and New Media within the History and Art History Department at George Mason University in 1994. RRCHNM also has always had women in key positions. Elena Razlogova joined Rosenzweig immediately, and served as programmer, system administrator, historian, and postdoctoral fellow until she departed to take up a position in the History Department at Concordia University in 2005. Kelly Schrum came to RRCHNM as a post-doctoral fellow in 2001 and has served as the Director of Educational Projects since 2005. Stephanie Hurter joined the group as a research assistant in 2002 and worked as a web designer until she departed for the U.S. State Department in 2006, and completed her doctorate in 2010. Amanda Shuman worked as a web developer from 2003 until she went to pursue a doctoral degree in Chinese History at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2006. Joan Fragaszy Troyano joined the Center as a research assistant in 2003, worked on history of science projects until her departure in 2005 to pursue a doctoral degree in American Studies at George Washington University, and returned to the Center between 2011 and 2014 to oversee the PressForward project. Sheila Brennan joined the Center as a research assistant in 2005 working on a wide range of public history projects, completed her doctorate in American history in 2010, and currently serves as the Director of Strategic Initiatives. Sharon Leon joined the group in 2004 as Associate Director of Educational Projects, and has served as Director of Public Projects since 2007. This cohort of women only begins to scrape the surface of the people who have actively shaped the well over 70 projects undertaken by RRCHNM since 1994.[36]

Finally, the much of the labor on the Valley project took place in the context of the Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH), which Ayers and Thomas founded in 1998. VCDH produced many projects, and included a number of women in key leadership roles. For example, Kim Tryka served as Assistant Director, and made major technical, structural, and information architecture contributions to a host of projects. Tryka went on to be a data research librarian at the National Library of Medicine. Alice Carter also served as Associate Director, supporting teaching and learning programs. The staff alumni list includes women in project management, programming, and designing roles. Finally, the VCDH list of seventeen individual project directors only includes one women, the list of student alumni includes loads of women.[37]

All of these early projects and foundational centers suggest that women’s work on digital history projects can get buried if we only pay attention to the founders and the individuals who are listed as principal investigators. In 2011, Tanya Clement and Doug Reside gathered a group of digital humanists at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities to discuss issues surrounding professionalization in digital humanities centers.[38] The conversations at that meeting recognized the significant degree to which digital humanities labor is performed by contingent faculty and classified staff, often who fail to receive sufficient credit for their efforts on projects. The two day gathering resulted in a full report with clear recommendations and the creation of the “Collaborator’s Bill of Rights.” The recommendations call for academic institutions to allow for scholarly staff to serve as principal investigators on grant funded work and strongly emphasize the need for each digital project to have a full and explicit credits page that accounts for everyone who has worked on the project.[39]

Making concerted progress on these factors is essential in surfacing women’s work in digital humanities and in digital history specifically, but it is not enough. As historians, digital and otherwise, watching the changing contours of our field, once these acknowledgements are made we need to make an effort to actually read the credits and about pages that accompany digital history projects, and to grapple with the range and significances of the contributions of the entire project team. Doing so will quickly surface the important work of the large numbers of women in digital history.

Furthermore, digital history project teams need to write explicitly about their work, both about the process and its scholarly implications. Over the course of his career, Roy Rosenzweig wrote enough articles and essays to fill an edited collection on digital history. In 2003, Edward Ayers and Will Thomas published one of the American Historical Review’s only hybrid digital articles based in the corpus of materials provided through the Valley of the Shadow project. Dan Cohen published numerous articles on his experiments in computational methods in historical research. Stephen Brier and Joshua Brown wrote about the preservation challenges surrounding the September 11 Digital Archive for the tenth anniversary of those tragic events. Cumulatively, these publications represent mark a lasting place in the authorized scholarly record.[40] For contingent faculty and staff on soft money, producing these kinds of peer reviewed articles can be nearly impossible to do given the timescales and constraints of project deliverables. Unless the analytical writing is built into the grant or the project plan, it is extraordinarily difficult to fit in, and the review and revision cycles for traditional scholarly publishing can outlast the period of performance for the project. Nonetheless, we must take this step so that the work gets recognized in the organs that perform the authorizing work for the field.

Beyond the Academy

Another way to get a better sense of the significant work of women in digital history to is to widen the scope of the work held up as representative of the field to include the larger “historical enterprise.”[41] Digital history continues to be represented in digital humanities in very narrow ways, often overlooking work that takes place outside of the academy within the bounds of public history institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums. Even when historians of digital history recognize significant projects from libraries, archives, and museums, they fail to acknowledge the ways that collaborative efforts are represented as institutional products in those venues. This practice masks the individual contributions and achievements of all who labor to produce it, including women.

This situation is born out in the way that the more than 300 digital history projects reviewed in the pages of the Journal of American History cite the work under examination. Of the reviewed projects, 68 (22%) explicitly list individual producers. A review of the names and some research suggests that of those with individual producers, 28 projects (9%) listed women (often in conjunction with men) and the other 40 projects (13%) listed only men. The remaining 239 projects point to some sort of institutional or organizational body as the producer: libraries and archives (31%), public history organizations (26%), universities (15%), and commercial entities (6%).[42] The general practice of these cultural heritage organizations is to recognize the organization as the creator/producer rather than the individual, which means that we need to do a little bit of digging to surface the ways that women have contributed to these projects.

We need a more broad definition of digital history work to surface the involvement of women employed at non-academic organizations. An examination of the workforce in cultural heritage organizations suggests that women will continue to lead the way. Though no data exists specifically for history museums, the American Association of Museums reports that as of 2009, the field as a whole was almost evenly split between men and women, with women representing 47.5% of a workforce that totaled just over 400,000 employees.[43] The 2006 census data about the archival profession reported that the 65% of the respondents were women. This gender balance represented a complete reversal of the ratio in the profession in 1956. Furthermore, there were almost twice as many women as men employed in academic archives. Finally, the trend in the field suggested an even more dramatic swing toward being dominated by women: nearly 4 out of 5 respondents under the age of 30 were women.[44] These individuals perform appraisal, selection, and description work that provides access to the body of evidence that historians rely upon to do their research. All of this is interpretive work in that shapes the contours of our understanding of the past. Finally, the available data on public historians also suggests that the field is heavily female. While women represent roughly 40% of the historians in academic settings, a 2008 survey of public historians reports that women comprise nearly 65% of the staff in that field. Like the situation with the archivists, this number represented a complete reversal of the status in 1980 when women accounted for only 36% of the field.[45]

For example, libraries and archives pioneered digital work to provide access to historical materials. One of the earliest and most recognizable digital history projects was the Library of Congress’s American Memory project.[46] Growing out of the National Digital Library Program (NDLP), American Memory eventually brought over 9 million digitized sources related to U.S. history and culture to the public.[47] Martha Anderson was integral to that work. She joined the Library staff in 1996 to work on the NDLP, and served as the production coordinator for American Memory. This pioneering project changed the field by dramatically increasing access to cultural heritage resources. Anderson went on to take a leadership role at the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, shepherding over a decade of work on digital preservation and stewardship until her retirement in 2012.[48] Anderson was joined in this effort by many women who have become leaders in the field of preservation and access, such as Abby Smith Rumsey and Abbie Grotke.[49]

Documentary editing projects—often housed at universities but staffed by non-tenure-line scholars—also embraced digital means of production and distribution quickly. One of the first ventures in historical documentary editing to do so was the Model Editions Partnership, which was funded by the National Historical Publication and Records Commission at the National Archives in 1995. The partnership brought together seven major documentary projects to experiment with creating digital editions using a subset of the Text Encoding Initiative markup.[50] The key initial partners included the Documentary History of the First Federal Congress, edited by Charlene Bickford, the Papers of Margaret Sanger, edited by Esther Katz and Cathy Moran Hajo, and the Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, edited by Ann Gordon. Eventually, the Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, edited by Allida Black, joined the partnership. Together, these editors formed a significant portion of the leading edge of documentary editing practice, and transformed the workflows that govern the production of scholarly editions today. At the University of Virginia similar efforts were afoot with the Dolly Madison Digital Edition, edited by Holly C. Shulman, which published its first installment online in 2004.[51] Shulman, who served as the Director of Documentary Editions at VCDH, went on in 2007 to join forces with Susan Holbrook Perdue to found Documents Compass, a non-profit organization that is part of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, to assist and advise documentary editors on the creation of digital editions.[52]

Experimentation with digital forms also infiltrated public history work, as museums and historical societies developed complex interpretive projects. One of the first of these began before there was a graphic web to be browsed, when in the late 1980s a coalition of members of the Society for the History of Technology applied to the National Science Foundation for a curriculum development grant to bring the history of science and technology into the social studies classroom, attracting women and minority students to the topics. Shepherded by Susan Smulyan, Bruce Sinclair, a large collaborative group of scholars, teachers, and public historians produced eight units that focused on textile technology in American History, drawing on the collections at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and the expertise at the Center for Children and Technology. Three of the eight modular curriculum units in the Whole Cloth project were published on the web in 1998.[53] Subsequently, Smulyan, from her position at Brown University, has spearheaded a number of collaborative cross-cultural and student-centered digital history projects. Since 2014, she has directed the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage.[54]

While some were at work creating curriculum that brought together collections and new approaches to digital history, others were attempting to translate physical museum exhibits into the web environment. In October 2001, the National Museum of American History launched the A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution website.[55] Jennifer Locke Jones, who is now Chair and Curator of the Division of Armed Forces History at NMAH, began her career at the museum working on the A More Perfect Union museum exhibit, which debuted in 1987. Then, she went on to be the Online Exhibit Curator for the website, undertaking the task of creating a digital project that represented the complex issues and themes highlighted in the museum exhibit. Jones was joined in this venture by Judith Gradwohl, who was the Web Program Director at the time, and a large team of collaborators at NMAH and at Second Story Interactive Studio. [56] The site won widespread praise, including taking the gold award in the history and culture category of the 2002 American Alliance of Museums’ Media and Technology Professional Network’s “Muse Awards” for work that best uses digital media to enhance the GLAM experience.[57]

Innovative digital public history work was not solely concentrated at the Smithsonian Institution. One of the most advanced projects in digital public history at the time was the Raid on Deerfield: Many Stories of 1704 from the Memorial Museum and the Potumtuck Valley Memorial Association. The site brought together collaborators from Native American and French Canadian cultural organizations to provide the multiple perspectives that five cultural groups (English, French, Wendat [Huron], Kanienkehaka [Mohawk], and Wobanaki) had on the conflict that took place in Deerfield Massachusetts.[58] Lead by Timothy Neumann, Lynne Spichiger, Angela Goebel-Bain, Barbara Mathews, Juliet Jacobson, and Don Button the site brought together primary sources, personal narratives, composite characters, artifacts and timelines to illustrate the conflicting understandings of this deeply important historical moment that touched the lives of Native peoples, French Canadians, and English colonial settlers.[59] The site won a number of awards, including a second place in the 2005 Museums and the Web, Best of the Web: Online Exhibit category, a 2005 American Association of State and Local History Award of Merit, and a 2007 MERLOT History Classics Award.[60]

These few examples highlight both early exemplary projects, and the key women who lead that work. Unfortunately, for the majority of digital history projects from cultural heritage institutions—institutions that employ remarkable numbers of women, it will be very difficult to clearly identify the individuals who participated in their planning and development since the majority of that work is identified as the work of the institution—the library, archive, museum, or historical society. Thus, dozens of other women who have produced significant digital history work will remain nameless. Perhaps in the future, regardless of whether or not their positions demand that their work be “work for hire,” the librarians, archivists, curators, editors, and public historians who collaborate on these projects will adhere to the recommendations put forth in the “Collaborators’ Bill of Rights” and create full and explicit credits and acknowledgements for the work so that all of the contributions can be clearly known.

Conclusion

Even the most cursory survey of the contemporary digital history landscape reveals that the field is populated with many, many women who are doing important work—directing projects, following new lines of inquiry, experimenting with innovative theories and methods, and pushing the field forward. If the fact that the quality of this work is on par with that of men’s is evident, we must ask ourselves why the stories we tell about the birth of the field include no women. If there is a groundswell of women doing exciting digital history work now, where did they come from? Where they there from the beginning? The recovery of the work of women on the first decade of the digital history web argues strongly that they were present and productive in this field from its earliest days. Ayers, Brier, Brown, Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Thomas undeniably shaped the field that we have inherited, but they were joined by a cast of women historians who also labored to mold digital history into the field we recognize today.

As with all systems that have been historically beset by unequal access to resources, opportunities, and power, the academy maintains structures that we need to deconstruct so that we can move forward. We must work purposefully to recognize the contributions of the underrepresented—those whose work is masked by inequity. Then, we must consciously revise our origin stories to be inclusive of these individuals and their influence. This essay tries to take small steps toward accomplishing this recovery and revision.

Yet, we must also grapple with the systematic and structural factors that have resulted in the erasure. Returning women to the story is not enough. We have to continue to work to revise the academic systems that have slowed women’s advancement to the senior ranks of the discipline of history. We have to work for full and fair representation of all of the contributions to collaborative digital projects—from those of the principal investigator, to those of the contingent faculty and post-docs, to those of the project managers, to those of the staff, to those of the graduate and undergraduate research assistants. Finally, we have to be willing to look further afield than traditional scholarly homes to recognize the major work that is occurring in the cultural heritage organizations where so many women are employed doing digital history work. Once we begin to do this work we will find ourselves much closer to being able to craft a more accurate and representative history of digital history.

[14] I queried the NEH database of funded projects (https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx) for the keywords history and digital or online or website. I then aggregated the results, de-duplicated them based on application identification number, and coded them for the sex of the named principal investigator, or Co-PI. This process is obviously an imprecise one based on assumptions about the sex characteristics associated with particular given names, and the gender presentation of subjects visible in images publicly available on the web.

[27] The new Metagraph section sometimes includes digital scholarship and sometimes includes digital reviews. Otherwise, the reviews are listed in the individual JAH issues tables of contents as Digital History Reviews. The reviews conducted through June 2014 have also been reproduced on the History Matters website (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/webreviews/). To conduct this analysis, I scraped the entries from the History Matters page and supplemented them by hand with the reviews that had been published between June 2014 and December 2015. I then hand-coded the entries by cited producer/creator.

[28]DoHistory, http://dohistory.org/; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990); A Midwife’s Tale, Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, writer and producer (PBS, American Experience, 1998); Jane Kamensky, “Review of Do History,” The Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (June 2001): 317–18, doi:10.2307/2675083; and David Jaffee, “Review of DoHistory,” The Public Historian 23, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 125–27, doi:10.1525/tph.2001.23.3.125.

[32] Anne Sarah Rubin, Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) and Sherman’s March and America: Mapping Memory, http://shermansmarch.org/.

[41] The term the “historical enterprise” is borrowed from Robert B. Townsend’s History’s Babel: Scholarship, Professionalization, and the Historical Enterprise in the United States, 1880-1940 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013).

I’ve been steadily making progress on my current project for about 8 weeks now, and I find myself writing a lot about the people who use digital public history websites and applications. The problem is, I can’t figure out what to call those people.

The traditional options include user, visitor, and audience. To me, user and visitor seem unnecessarily vague, but audience is even worse because it bakes in a sense of passive reception that just doesn’t reflect reality when so much of the web is interactive and participatory.

Given this dissatisfaction, I turned to the OED thesaurus for a little inspiration. Sadly, I found none.

user: handler; utilizer

visitor: comer; repairer; resorter; visitant; guest; caller

audience: spectators; listeners; viewers; onlookers

There are several other options that arise when we consider the idea that we might want to create dialogic experiences with our digital public history work:

partner

participant

contributor

volunteer

community member

Of these, I like community member best, but that doesn’t leave much room for the notion of reaching new people who might not already be invested in the work.

In the course of a twitter conversation, Tom Scheinfeldt suggested that he is trying to use “people-first” constructions: people who engage with the site; people who contribute content; etc. That definitely has some appeal — to talk about what people do, rather than who they are — but I worry that it’s too easy to lose the essential role that social context plays in shaping the ways that those people interact with work.

So, I offer this question to the wisdom of the crowd (another term I don’t like).

How should we refer to the people who engage with our digital public history work?